Sleeping too much is just as bad as sleeping too little

Bad news for uni students, freelance writers and the unemployed: sleeping too much is just as bad for your body as sleeping too little.

New research published in Biological Psychiatry has found that consistently spending more than 8 hours under the sheets snoozing raises your markers for bodily inflammation.

This may not sound that bad, but having high markers for inflammation has been linked to a whole variety of illnesses, including depression, heart disease, increased blood pressure and greater risk of stroke.

Dr John Krystal, editor of Biological Psychiatry, believes this finding just goes to show that it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

"It is important to highlight that both too much and too little sleep appears to be associated with inflammation, a process that contributes to depression as well as many medical illnesses," says Krystal.

Although this may sound like the scientists simply want to ruin your life, the reason why over-sleeping is just as bad as chronically forcing yourself out of bed is all down to two chemicals in your blood called CRP and IL-6.

These two chemicals, when you get the required 7-8 hours of sleep a night, stay at reasonable levels and help your blood pressure regulate itself around the daily stressors of life.

But when you drastically cut your sleep short thanks to an impromptu Orange Is the New Black marathon, the levels of CRP and IL-6 in your blood stream begin to rise, causing your blood pressure to shoot up and your health to shoot way down.

After examining 72 different articles, which involved over 50,000 participants, the researchers concluded that that sleeping too much raised the levels of CRP and IL-6 exactly the same as sleeping too little.

But that's not all – the researchers also speculated that regularly cocooning yourself in your bed for more than eight hours is as unhealthy for you as being sedentary, or eating an extremely high-fat diet.

According to Dr Michael Irwin, one of the authors of the study, this finding simply goes to show that your body requires a "sweet spot" for good health.

"Together with diet and physical activity, sleep health represents a third component in the promotion of health-span," says. Irwin.

For many Australians, the idea of having time to even sleep at all is seen as a luxury. Almost 25 percent of us are chronically under-sleeping – that is, getting less than five hours a night – and that costs our economy more than $5 billion every year in lost productivity and fatigue-related accidents.

Nobody has yet to do a study on how many Aussies are over-sleeping, but I assume they'll get around to it, once they punch the snooze button a few more times.